If Christians are the problem, as so many seem to think, how is it that so many charities, hospitals and the original homeless shelters still have distinctively Christian names?

Why also do you suppose that the Founders spoke so plainly of Christianity as an essential element of American society?

I am amazed at how ignorant most Americans are of the "Founders." It seems that the "Christian" political groups have an agenda to obfuscate the truth by erroneously portraying the "Founders" as a cohesive group of devout Christians who set out forge a "Christian" nation.

In actuality - though there were some devout Christians who are considered "founding fathers" of the country - the "Founders" were very much like what we see in politics today: a often oppositional collection of divergent thinkers with a wide range of beliefs and agendas. Many of the "Founders" were not "Christians" at all, but rejected organized religion altogether as a relic of an "unenlightened" era in the past. Yet others were adherents of "Deism", which was a belief in an ultimate creator who did not meddle or care about the daily lives of people.

The "Founders" of the nation were all products of the Enlightenment who held European governments as failed models of government that used force and religion to keep wealth and society stratified along lines of genealogy instead of merit. The "Founders" almost unanimously feared having religion and government intertwined.

The country's legal system was not founded on biblical principles, but was founded on the Roman Republic and Greek Democracy (both very polytheistic societies).

Though the settlement of the colonies a couple hundred years prior to the American Revolution was achieved in a large part by devout religious groups seeking to escape persecution for their beliefs in Europe, there were also groups settling the colonies for nothing more than a chance to make money.

Just as societal mores have generally changed in the last couple hundred years judging by today's standards, so too had they changed between the time the "Puritans" landed at Plymouth Rock and the eve of the American Revolution arrived.

Certain religious groups today have a clear agenda of attempting to replace historical fact with bedtime fiction in portraying the settlement of the colonies and the founding of our Republic as one unified, Christian-driven destiny when in fact it was really a collection of periods with diverse driving forces. Other pseudo scholars could just as easily pick entirely different evidential motivations as root causes of the nation's genesis.